Study machine movement gestures to affect human perception and behavior, using both physical and virtual testing strategies. This has resulted in work investigating perception of robot-robot dynamics during game play, signaling robot personality through appearances like clothing, using robotics to aid self-identification psychologically, investigating multi-robot signalling with observers, prototyping strategies using video and VR for human-robot interaction. On-going projects include Social Rejection in Robot-Robot-Human Interaction, using video and robot arms to study how group dynamics affect interpretation of being rejected by robots; AI as Active Writer, with Dr. Toby Li (Notre Dame) on human perception of collaborative expressive machine writing agent on a digital platform; Presentation of Self in Machine Life on human-machine dance performance through virtual and physical telepresence and expressive gestures of a robot arm; Select on moral responses of digital game characters; Connected Gaze on audience-machine collaboration using interactive gestures in telepresence spaces for performing arts. We would also love to collaborate with Dr. Alvaro Cassinelli on the machine emotional gestures projects.

Key publications:

• LC R, Benayoun M, Lindborg PM, Xu HS, Chan HC, Yip KM, Zhang TY. (2021) “Power Chess: Robot-to-robot nonverbal emotional expression applied to competitive play.” ACM ARTECH 2021: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Digital and Interactive Arts. Alveiro, Portugal: 13-15 October. ACM, NYC.
• Friedman N, Love K, LC R, Sabin JE, Hoffman G, Ju W. (2021) “What Robots Need From Clothing.” In ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS’21). June 28-July 2.
• LC R, Alcibar A, Baez A, and Torossian S. (2020) “Machine Gaze: Self-Identification Through Play With a computer Vision-Based Projection and Robotics System.” Frontiers in Robotics and AI: Human-Robot Interaction. 
• LC R. (2021) “Now You See Me, Now You Don’t: Revealing personality and narratives from playful interactions with machines being watched.” Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI’21). 
• Zamfirescu-Pereira JD, Sirkin D, Goedicke D, LC R, Friedman N, Mandel I, Martelaro N, Ju W. (2021) “Fake It to Make It: Exploratory Prototyping in HRI.” Companion Proceedings of the 2021 ACM IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI’21).

Key personnel:

• RAY LC, Hongshen Xu, Zijing Lillian Song, Toby Li (collab).